Will It Drop? The 2013 Fourth-Quarter Rap Album Probability Index

Started from the bottom, now they're here (or in limbo)

As September begins, there are possibly more major hip-hop albums set for release in the last four months of 2013 than were actually released in the previous eight. If you wanted to dream big — Andre 3000 doesn’t only film razor commercials, right? — you could easily imagine upwards of 50 great rap albums seeing the light of day as the calendar slowly turns toward 2014.

Of course, that’s not going to happen: One of the reasons why rap albums have cast such a long shadow over the rest of 2013 is because so many of them were already supposed to be out. This phenomenon is nothing new, but as we crash into fall, many of the most anticipated rap albums of the year — or multiple years — have yet to drop.

So, who is actually going to put an album out? For everyone except those sitting inside the most exclusive boardrooms, the question is a mere guessing game. So that’s what we’ve done: made educated guesses on which rappers are most — and least — likely to actually see release in 2013. We’ve weighed a number of factors: Does the album have a release date? How many release dates has it had? What about a track list? Cover? Singles? And from there, we assigned an (admittedly arbitrary) percentage to represent the chance that you’ll have an album by your favorite rapper before December 31.

We stuck to projected retail releases here — sorry Meek Mill and Chief Keef — and focused mainly on major-label artists (with a few major exceptions). Many of these rappers are in release-date purgatory — can they dig themselves out?